Dishonored Is a Whale of a Game

Dishonored goes after the head and the heart rate. It scores high marks as a playable action-adventure game and as a think piece featuring a lot of morality plays and decisions that affect the way the story unfolds.

The Arkane Studios title, which went on shelves this week for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC, should attract a diverse crowd. It was well-developed and well-designed and has a depth that doesn’t feel forced or hokey. It’s hard to put down the controller once you’re into the game, and well worth the $60 price tag.

Dishonored’s tightly contained virtual world is not nearly as grand as Skyrim’s. Its graphics aren’t as sharp as Fable: The Journey, which also came out this week. But Dishonored is special. Beyond its riveting gameplay and complex storyline, this is the first game I’ve played where my choices affected the way other characters treated me and how my journey progressed in more than a simple, direct and immediate way. Yes, I found that choosing to wield my sword resulted in my opponent using his own blade. But as your choices accumulate, you find your storyline changing. Based on my decisions to use violence in my first playing and stealth in the second to accomplish missions, I found myself in very different situations each time. And a spoiler alert: Your approach to the game may also affect the game’s ending.

Dishonored takes place in Dunwall, a dystopic industrial whaling city gutted by a plague spread by rats. Dunwall is one of four city-states on the Isle of Gristol and is the capital of the Empire of Isles. Modeled after Victorian London, the virtual state is in chaos, with corrupt leaders and their militarized security personnel using various forms of horrible technology to spread fear and attempt to exert some control over the populace. Crime is rampant and gangs roam the streets.

You are Corvo Attano, protector of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin. As the game opens, you’re just returning from a critical mission to the neighboring states to see if they could help cure that plague. You’re ready to make your report back to the Empress. As the game title suggests, through treachery, you are accused of her murder, become a prisoner, then a fugitive and assassin serving the so-called Loyalists who are trying to restore the young daughter of the empress to the throne. You carry out a series of missions – mostly the kind of wet work assassins do – for the Loyalist cause. In-between you go for a cold, frosty one at a Loyalist pub and saddle up with new gear from the Dunwallian version of James Bond’s “Q.”

Dishonored is billed as a stealth-adventure game, though there are plenty of weapons and enough shootings to make you call this a first-person shooter. But it’s far from a mindless one. You play from a first-person perspective, and the game is single player only. The setting is absolutely fascinating. It’s epically steampunk, with lots of massive systems of pipes and ducts and three-rail train tracks across the state, everything managing to look both old and quaint, but also extremely hip and futuristic at the same time. A great example is the walls of light that prevent passage through different parts of Dunwall. The Tesla-like devices are powered by canisters of whale oil. And in most places, you’ll see whale-oil lights illuminating things.

Everything in the game was recognizable in the game, but the graphics were subpar, and I had to fiddle with brightness controls far too much for my taste to be able to see in dim settings.

During your missions, you will collect runes and bone charms that let you use special powers — 10 in total — like teleporting or slowing down time. A heart will help you find them, even through walls. You can restore health or powers with various elixirs you’ll find along the way. And you can pick up coins that let you purchase power upgrades and weapons to add to your arsenal, including a crossbow with different kinds of bolts – normal, sleep-inducing or incendiary, a gun and bullets and grenades. Through much of the game you’ll be wielding a sword in your right hand and a secondary weapon in the left. Combat is fun. Enemies are smart and unpredictable, even at easy settings. Navigating your way through and around barriers is difficult and requires your best problem-solving skills. I like that it’s just as hard to sneak your way through a situation, completely undetected, as it is to blast and hack your way out of one. I also like the choice of using smarts — a steampunk rewiring device, for example – to overcome high-tech defenses or alarms.

Controls in this game are mostly a snap. You can call up a wheel by clicking one button and then select a weapon or power. You can map favorites to the d-pad. You can walk, sprint, hide and peer around corners. I had early problems with my view always skewing right. Something was off with my X-Y axes, and needed to be recalibrated. It was an annoyance in combat situations until I figured out how to adjust sensitivity. I found the game’s heads-up system a bit too basic, but not hard to use.

You get no small assist on your push through the storyline from the enigmatic “Outsider,” who appears in visions and gives you instructions and guidance.

Four different skill levels affect the difficulty of gameplay, including how tough and alert your opponents are and your power and damage levels. On the easiest setting, some of my damage caused by combat was repaired without my having to suck down an elixir potion.

Where Dishonored diverges pleasantly from other games is in freedom of choice in how you carry out your missions. You are rewarded for accomplishing, whether you used smarts, stealth or brute force. How you carry the mission out, though, does affect the storyline and the way other characters behave toward you. It’s a welcome change from other, more cookie-cutter-type games. Without giving away too much, a situation you might find yourself in gives you the choice of charging into a room with your sword drawn, ready to do battle and kill the two people you suspect might be in that room. Or, you can look through the keyhole or peer around a corner to see if the people you expected are in the room. Or, you can sometimes sneak in, and instead of alerting them or their guards, you could, in a very stealthy way, quietly slit throats or use poison to accomplish your goals. And, with kidnapping or other nonlethal options sometimes at your disposal, you can sometimes complete a mission with no blood on your hands.

Dishonored’s Chaos Engine also meant no two situations I came across in the game were exactly alike. I died a lot in the early going, as I tried to find my way around the same scene nearly a dozen times, I realized I couldn’t really count on enemies being in the same place each time or behaving the same way when I engaged.

The game is a bit too gory in parts, but after the third or fourth decapitation of an enemy, I started to giggle. Later, I was desensitized and no longer grossed out. The rat swarms that devour bodies, though, I never did get over the “ewww” factor from that.There are family settings on the Xbox that let you control the gore, but there’s no fun in that.

One other quibble I had was with the storyline. While enthralled by gameplay, I started to drift as I got immersed in the game. It wasn’t at all clear until very late if or how my missions for the Loyalists would have any effect on the staggering plague that gripped Dunwall. Though the uncertainty lent an extra dimension of excitement to the game, it also caused me more than a bit of consternation and reflection. I kept wondering if I had missed something in all the political machinations and web of killings, sneaking around and kidnappings.

Compared to the hype and hoopla surrounding other recent game releases, Dishonored virtually whispered its way onto the market with very little hyperbole or controversy. Publisher Bethesda didn’t overpromise and ended up delivering a game far above my expectations.